Primordial Haptics, 1925-1935: Hands, Tools and the Psychotechnics of Prehistory
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Date
2022-03-01
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
‘Psychotechnics’, Weimar Germany’s science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of ‘technological media’ – obscuring the persistent significance of ‘dexterity’, ‘skill’ and ‘manual labour’ at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe ‘the haptic’ as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the ‘organ of touch’, this essay aims to complicate this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of ‘ideal’ hand tools. Herig’s eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of ‘touch’, far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of (manual) labour.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
28 (1-2)
Pages / Article No.
60 - 90
Publisher
SAGE
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Subject
dexterity; haptics; manual labour; psychotechnics; tools; Weimar Republic